Well, maximizing the potential of high-traffic keywords is actually more complex than it looks. There are a number of best practices and a handful of potential issues which arise when incorporating high-traffic terms into your search campaigns:

High Cost and High Competition - If you know that a term gets searched on a lot, chances are a lot of other people do too. The market is flooded with free to cheap keyword research services which offer anyone with Internet access the same list of competitive keywords you're targeting.

Broad Phrases Have Questionable Intent - For a phrase to get a lot of search volume, it typically has to be a short key phrase. In fact, it's often the case that the most searched keywords have multiple meanings. It's difficult to target a term (particularly as you pay for each click) when a fair number of searchers are after something slightly to wholly different than what you're offering. All of a sudden your "high-volume keyword" offers slightly less relevant traffic for your business.

A Short List of Keywords is a Stagnant List of Keywords - While the long tail is extremely fluid and often subject to the unpredictable whims of the billions of individuals currently searching for content on the Web, the most popular keywords are far less mutable. These keywords' search volumes rarely change, and focusing a search campaign around acquiring this traffic can quickly lead to traffic plateaus.

But, for all the buzz surrounding long-tail keywords, there's still a lot of traffic in the high-traffic, most searched words (go figure).

So the question becomes how to attack high-volume keywords within your search marketing campaign. That's precisely what we'll deal with in the coming paragraphs.

Paying Less for Popular Keyword Searches

Popular keywords are often priced high. This is because, as we mentioned, the traffic-driving keywords aren't a secret. Your competitors know about them, and are likely bidding them up.

Quality Score algorithms are comprised of a few core elements, and all of these revolve around relevance. WordStream offers multiple Quality Score solutions to improve the relevance (and lower the cost) of your keywords:

Keyword Grouping Tools - A key component of the Quality Score algorithm is the relevance of a keyword to its Ad Group. We'll show you how WordStream's grouping tools enable you to create Quality Score friendly groupings centered around traffic-driving SEM keywords.

Ad Text and Landing Page Optimization Tools - Two of the most important factors in achieving high Quality Score are the relevance of your keywords and search queries, and your historical click-through rate (CTR). Being able to generate ads and landing pages that speak to your search queries are crucial to pleasing search engines and searchers (if an ad is relevant to a query, a searcher is more likely to click, and if a landing page offers similar messaging to the ad they just clicked on, a searcher is more likely to convert).

Grouping Your Most Popular Search Keywords

Let's imagine we're running a website that sells electronic gadgets. We sell items items such as cell phones, laptops, and LCD monitors. We take a look at our log files, and note that organic search is driving the most traffic for the terms:

Cell phones

Laptops (one word)

LCD monitors

Some free keyword research confirms that these are high-traffic keywords. So, what do we do with them?

The problem is, these words aren't closely related. If we attempt to cram these three words into a single Ad Group, we'll get slammed on Quality Score and will have to pay a lot every time someone clicks on our ad. A better idea is to give each term its own group.

Better yet: while we're creating a keyword group for each of these terms, why not surround it with keywords that search engines will view as closely related? We'll also want to make sure that these keywords are all linguistically similar: that way, we can easily write ad text variations that speak to the entire Ad Group.

Note the process here:

Query your personal keyword database - Type in the high-volume keyword in question, and have every highly relevant variation of that term (in this case, "cell phones") returned for you.

Create a group - Simply click "Create Keyword Group" and WordStream has created a brand new, Quality Score friendly keyword grouping you can easily turn into an Ad Group. And imagine how easy it will be to write ad text that speaks to all these keywords (they all contain some variation of "cell phone"!).

Additionally, you can focus on only the "most popular" variations of this keyword, moving the long-tail variations into their own group, if you find that that works better for your campaign's tracking and performance:

You can sort by number of terms (in this case "cell phones" consists of two terms, or words) or a minimum amount of visits:

And, as always, a new segmentation is only a click away.

Making Your Most Popular Keyword Searches Your Most Relevant Keyword Searches

Additionally, WordStream offers tools that help you to craft compelling and Quality Score friendly ad text and landing pages:

In the above image, WordStream is suggesting text to be included in the ad for this ad group. You'll have to edit the text to include a clear call to action, and to make it more compelling and attractive to searchers (proper punctuation, logical phrasing, etc.) but WordStream offers the linguistic foundations for a successful text ad.

Similarly, the application can suggest effective landing page content for a given Ad Group. The above text editor suggests potential landing page "headers." Additionally, if you're attempting to craft a single landing page for multiple groups, WordStream offers sophisticated visualization tools which allow you to see not only a single group, but other, related child groups:

Here we see a series of variations of "cell phones." Using these phrases prominently on the landing page in question will increase the relevancy score for "cell phones" while also improving the user experience and increasing conversions (as searchers are more likely to engage with your landing page when they see the term they were searching for).

expanding and refining the reach of popular searches

While it seems counterintuitive, it's necessary to simultaneously expand and constrict the reach of these broad keywords:

Grow Your Audience - It's important to overcome the stagnancy of the traffic metrics associated with a handful of the most popular keywords in your vertical.

WordStream offers a robust tool set which enables you to go beyond targeting single keywords. Learn more about how you can grow your audience without over-expanding into irrelevant, unreceptive realms by reading more about our: